


i am going to walk out of here free

by knifetop



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, Fix-It, M/M, Spirit Journeying Yourself To Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 18:14:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19405573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knifetop/pseuds/knifetop
Summary: Eliot goes to therapy, twice. (The final escape from the Happy Place, with a fix-it ending.)





	i am going to walk out of here free

**Author's Note:**

> hailey (@cartographies on ao3) called this a love letter to eliot, which it is. other than the best romance of all time, what i loved the most about 4x05 was how eliot's story was an adventure of his interiority where the stakes were both life-or-death and significant emotional development, which i wanted to continue here. it is also accidentally a birthday gift to hailey, who cheerlead me while watching me write it live on google docs. also thank you to my magicians slack pals, yet again, for everything!
> 
> please see end notes for trigger warnings, which this fic needs. title from "black pear tree" by the mountain goats ft. kaki king.

“Okay, um,” he said. “Can we do that again?”

Quentin nodded, patiently, like his projection of him always did, looking at him with doe-eyed expectancy. Eliot still felt a blooming in his chest over how perfect he was, even though he was fake, it was an idea of Quentin that he had. All the pathetic sometimes-literal masturbatory stuff he had been doing with this Q—

But this was important.

“I love you,” he said, and he made himself look at Quentin in the eyes, he made himself say it with conviction.

Quentin smiled with dimples and gave a short, confirming nod.

“You’re getting better at it, El,” he said, hope in his voice that Eliot must have felt for himself, somewhere.

“So _this_ is what your so-called ‘therapy’ is,” Charlton said tonelessly, from the couch in the unreal Physical Kids’ cottage where they were, of course, holed up to wait for, Eliot didn’t really know.

He had tilted at windmills a few times, but once he had gotten pulled back out of his body the memory lost its juice, and then he was just there for like, ten more times, watching himself. In this spate of trying to get out again, he still watched one more time for good measure, to make himself remember: the way Quentin’s face had not closed even after everything Eliot said. Quentin’s small, small voice. If he wasn’t angry enough at himself, if this all wasn’t to get back to his Q and his Margo and just fucking be a person, he would go insane.

But it didn’t take him long to figure out that his memories weren’t the only ones there for him to walk into. In this fashion, he watched several Early Gods horror movies, except the Monster maybe had no concept of what he’d looked like and remembered himself (itself? Theirself?) as Eliot. But it would be Eliot in, uh, a weird Toga thing? If it didn’t make him feel sick to his stomach, which he wasn’t even currently the physical owner of, he might have tried to figure out if it worked for him as a look.

“All of this is...most unusual,” Charlton had said, with some hastily-forced nonchalance over a rising alarm in his expression.

“I mean, the thing _is_ in my head,” Eliot said. “I’m basically doing a dorm inspection.”

God, he had really been given carte blanche to be a shithead at Brakebills.

Charlton just shook his head, clearly bothered and thinking of something. “Your humor is inadequate. Be careful.”

Then there was no way to tell how much time passed between then and when Penny-23 found the door, thank fucking God, and then he was gone before Eliot could even really give his full exposition monologue, and then it was done. Eliot was alone again, and had to find his way back to safer places in his own mind.

And it was impossible to tell how much time had passed between that moment and this one, when Eliot drew up short, annoyed with Charlton even though Charlton probably had every right to be way more annoyed with his My Chemical Romance-post-Quentin-ass.

“Okay, no, _this is not exactly therapy_ , you obtuse Fillorian bitch,” he said.

“Oh—you know, no, it totally is! It’s kinda like CBT, actually,” not-really-Quentin offered, apparently excited to contribute.

“Cock and...ball…torture?” said Eliot.

Quentin, unfazed even though Eliot would love to see him blush, offered, “Cognitive behavioral therapy?”

Eliot’s eyes narrowed down at him. “And how do I...know that?” Quentin just shrugged.

“Maybe you, like, uh, magically know that because you think I would know that,” Quentin said, smiling then, closing some space between them, “and you’re just, you’re so good at magic, honey.”

This Quentin was, like, a weird hybrid of Early Days Virginal Q and Quentin when they were working on the mosaic, but at his most housewife. And even though Eliot had also dodged monsters to go back into his own memory of breaking out of his body to see if he could get any, he didn’t know, _clues_ (what else was there to do?), and he totally had processed that Quentin had apparently cut a lot of his beautiful, beautiful hair off, well. This Quentin still had long hair. And he still stammered.

“I’m really fucking embarrassing,” he said, but it was fond, more of Quentin than himself. Not-Quentin smiled up at him, very warm.

Charlton made a noise not unlike gagging. His references were really fully getting Earth-modern now considering he had lived even pre-Fillorian Swayze contact. Eliot rolled his eyes, and decided to try again, taking Quentin’s jaw in his hand.

“I love you,” he said, and Quentin smiled up at him still, beatific. 

It was impossible to keep track of time in this place, which made Eliot, with contrariness a historically very powerful motivator in his life, try.

He could do magic in his own head unrelated to its existence or lack thereof in the outside world, and produced a calendar that was supposed to be connected to actual earth sunrise and sunset. This was Brakebills 101 stuff, and the spell _working_ connected to something his body was experiencing was maybe sound logic? He didn’t know. Margo had appeared to talk the mechanics of this one out, and then he had held her for a while, because it was less empty-feeling to think of a memory of Margo as comfort than it was with the projection of Quentin.

It was a day-at-a-time calendar. One day had blacked out, slowly, like the sun dimming, and pulled itself off of the pad and fell to the floor. This took what felt for Eliot like a long, long time.

Charlton seemed impressed with it, and tilted his head like, _not bad._ “You are good at showy solutions to unimportant problems,” he commented.

Eliot was, wow, so taken aback he was shocked. “ _What the actual fuck_ , Charlton?”

Charlton shrugged. “We’re living in your head, I think you’re rubbing off.” Eliot shook his head then groaned, loudly, and pitched backward into the nearest chair, yes, with some drama.

More days fell off, and he noticed something weird. Sometimes he ‘went’ to ‘sleep’ and woke again, and found definitely more and more days have disappeared. His experience of time was dilated. Well. There was nothing he could fucking do about it, so.

Then one day, there was a knock on the door.

He jerked out of whatever it was that was happening, when he ‘went’ to ‘sleep’.

“Don’t answer it,” Charlton said, standing from some couch into Knight Pose.

As soon as fear dawned, Margo, Quentin, and Fen appeared.

“What is this, numbnuts?” Margo said, to Charlton.

“I have no way of knowing more than your mind does,” Charlton said. “I, again, would suggest we avoid _answering it_. If it is not opening, then maybe it cannot—”

The knock came again, and it went painfully slow, horror movie: _knock—knock—knock._

“Ohhhh, shit,” said Quentin, all of his mind-friends looking at the door.

“We’ve got this,” said Fen, suddenly with knives or maybe in his mind always having knives.

There was a long silence, like a held breath. And there was another _knock—knock—tap—tap—_ the noise at the door faded to something that almost sounded like a scratch, then was gone entirely.

“Uh,” said Eliot, “that’s...reassuring—“

But when he turned to get one of his projections or Charlton to respond to him, they were gone. The feeling of being alone hit him with a jagged edge.

“Hey, Eliot,” a small voice said, behind him.

It was one he recognized. In the timeless nature of his mind, it seemed like he had just been in a great, surprisingly solid memory with the owner of it. He turned, again.

“Hey, Taylor,” he said.

Taylor seemed to consider him, but Eliot got to his knees, some lingering dad instinct kicking around in his brain, maybe, to get level with a child.

“It’s weird that I added you on Facebook a few years ago,” Taylor said.

Eliot nodded in concession.

“Like it’s really sad,” he went on. Taylor’s comically large eyes blinked at him. Had he been in love with Taylor at that age? Probably a little. He had been in love with anyone nice to him.

“You know, I was so proud of you when you never talked to me, after,” Eliot said. It was him talking to himself but it felt weirdly good after he said it? Had he ever really articulated the weird _admiration_ that he’d felt after his sick shame when Taylor didn’t just take him back as a fellow-reject? But it took guts, guts that Eliot wouldn’t have had, to stay mad someone you had once known to be safe.

“Maybe it wasn’t sad, then?” said Taylor. He wasn’t Taylor, and this version Taylor didn’t exist anymore in reality, so it was very clearly just him guessing in a way that was blurrier when it was his other mental projections talking to him. “Facebook. People can want to talk about things after a while, Eliot.”

Eliot smiled, and it felt tight. “That’s true,” he said. “I guess.”

Taylor seemed to take him in, in a calculating way that was not really possible for a 12-year-old, no matter how much he thought he had known at that age about pain. “You think it’s all about Logan Kinnear, but I think it’s all about me.”

Eliot’s smile dropped. His eyes narrowed. “Okay, Externalized-Shame-Me,” he said, with the lilt of someone being sold a used car. “Keep talking.”

“Not here,” Taylor said. “Stand up.”

Eliot stood without preamble then, weirdly, thought to look back around. It was pretty easy to explain why his emotional support hallucinations had disappeared, but why was _Charlton_ gone? Eliot had gotten the impression that he couldn’t be gone unless he chose to, like, comport himself elsewhere.

Knowing what he was thinking, obviously, Taylor said, “The structures of the Monster’s mind are breaking down.”

Eliot blinked. “Okay,” he said. “Is that, like, conjecture I’m subconsciously doing, or…?”

Taylor shook his head. “It’s something that is known to you now. That’s how you got to the Monster’s memories. You used a lot of force to get to that door. That’s your conjecture because of what I said.”

“That one I know, Fake Taylor,” he said. And, improbably, considering he was possibly about to deliver a thesis to himself about a moment in his life when he was truly fucking terrible, he suddenly felt like if he moved he would have a little bounce in his step. “I have...incredible mental stamina, maybe?”

Taylor’s face was almost inhumanly flat. “You beat me up and called me a queer, and then you called yourself queer after you dropped out of undergrad,” he said.

Eliot, surprisingly, only winced instead of feeling his whole, uh, at this moment metaphorical stomach pitch. “Can’t say I don’t know how to kill the mood,” he said.

“I don’t think it’s helpful for you to call me _you_. You’re avoiding the issue.” Taylor shakes his head. “We should leave.”

In the same thought, the same instance, Eliot did not even have to blink for reality to fold into something else. He was not surprised when he looked around and it was the Logan Kinnear street corner, where a half-formed thought that came from his own brain had turned into death forever. It had been bright outside, that day, and he squinted with it now, though there was the background thought always that he really had no physical form to speak of.

But the corner was empty, as far as the eye could see. A bus was there, going the opposite direction on the street, and stopped as if frozen more than parked, but no other cars. There was no Logan Kinnear.

“You think this is it,” Taylor said, looking up at him.

“Um,” Eliot said. And the worst thing about this was, there was nothing but time to do this. What else was he going to do? Yet another half-hearted attempt to fuck fake Quentin? Jesus Christ.

There was a bench down the block and he walked them to it, and he thought suddenly that in the stillness he heard the bus engine idling, like another choice could still be made even though it couldn’t.

“Explain what I’m thinking, Taylor,” he said to him, finally.

“You’re still doing it,” said Taylor, ruefully, but still blank. “You’re avoiding the issue. You’re pretending.” Eliot didn’t fully understand what sad, small, dead part of him this was. Maybe it was all there was of him, really.

“I mean, I’m always pretending,” said Eliot.

Taylor shook his head. “Not right now. Not here. You can’t because you want to escape more than you want to be safe now. So we have to use that while we have the time.”

“And what you’re saying it’s emotional revelations all the way down,” Eliot said, leaning forward, rolling his neck with the motion as if in pain, feeling improbably like he had a headache. He groaned.

“That’s just what life is, you fucking dumbass,” said Taylor, still flat.

Eliot pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, then sat up. Nothing around them changed, even though he hoped it would and they would be done with this detour. He thought to ask more questions about how the mechanics of this were working now, the shadow creatures and the Monster-Monster, but he just wanted to get to the fucking point for once in his life.

“So what did you bring me here to say?”

Taylor nodded, then, and got to his feet to stand in front of him, not eye-level with him on a bench. “When you think of why you’re a bad person, you think of this,” he said. Thankfully there was no reel of the accident then, even though he expected it, just still the low tones of the idling of the bus’ engine, a soft metallic rattling curling anxiety into his stomach.

“Yes,” said Eliot, redundantly.

“It was me, though. It was always me.”

Their reality changed again; it was the gym this time, of course. There was a smear of blood on the floor and now the Taylor he projected had a ruined nose, bleeding profusely.

“Jesus fuck,” said Eliot, feeling his face start to crumple, helplessly, the way it had not when he had actually seen the scene with his part to play in it, but he stopped himself. He pulled his tie free as an afterthought and bent in front of Taylor, and put the cloth to his nose. Taylor just stared at him until he pulled it back after he had gently, carefully wiped away some blood that was both slightly caked-on and fresh, befitting a beating of a few minutes.

“I had a black eye too,” he said. “Black eyes, really.”

“I know,” Eliot said, and he thought helplessly of himself as a child, and then surprisingly, in a pitch he definitely felt in his stomach this time, Teddy. If anyone had ever hurt Teddy, who didn’t even exist anymore, maybe had never existed. If anyone ever hurt Fray, his fucking not-daughter as much as this was not-Taylor, as it was not-Quentin, not-Margo, not-Fen. His other real child was dead, as good as unreal, barely having been alive, maybe had died suffering. It was genuinely so fucking incomprehensibly awful it was masochistic to think about now, so.

“It was worse than this,” Taylor went on.

“I know,” he said again. It would be pointless to apologize to himself inside himself. “I’m so sorry,” he said, anyway.

Taylor nodded, gaze unwavering. “Between kicking my nose in and breaking Quentin Coldwater’s fully adult heart, which is worse?” he said.

Eliot shook his head uselessly, lost for any response, since he had again made his choice already and made it wrong. Then Taylor seemed to grow impatient.

“You don’t understand still. It’s not that it’s not worse. It’s that hurting me is part of you. If you were a book of spells I’m an opening line.”

Eliot just looked at him, numbness and overwhelming feeling washing over him at once.

“One time,” started Taylor, without significant pause, “when you got really high, you thought about how much you hated what you did to me. And then you thought how it was worse, what you did to Logan Kinnear, because you didn’t feel as bad about killing someone as you did about what you did to me.”

Eliot swallowed. “I did. I did maybe have that thought.”

No points are deducted this time for his deflection. Apparently his whole brain just wants to get the fuck on with it. “Logan hurts the most because you’re afraid that you don’t feel as bad as you should,” Taylor said, plainly stating, what, decades of avoided half-thoughts that he would put back away.

Eliot stared at him.

“You feel like you let everyone down. Anything you touch, you think it turns to shit. Who did you let down first?”

There was the sound of the bus screeching, deafening and echoing improbably in the gym, making the little boy simulacra turn as if to look at the source of the sound that had none, then the world changed, again.

The cottage of Eliot’s memory had a recent, sort of, scent spike from his golem moment. It all smelled like cinnamon suddenly, but not like it came from scented candles. It was real, good cinnamon, the kind Eliot would want to cook with. It felt like his heart was beating hard. Maybe the Monster was feeling the same thing, maybe wondering at it.

Hope so, to _that_ fucker.

The light was honeyed again, a renewed warmth that he realized with a start had been draining from the idea of the cottage he was inhabiting, and Margo was lazing on the couch. Her eyes clearly alighted on him, even though he was the only one in the room, but that would have been the case in real life, too.

“Oh, finally, thank fucking _god,_ ” said Margo, “get your ass over here!”

Eliot smiled without being able to help it. He was too aware of everything to think that this was the happy place clawing him back, and he went to Margo with the same generosity that he would have always gone to Margo, as she cooed for him in a way that would make bystanders uncomfortable until he settled wrapped in her arms.

“There we go, hi, sweetie,” she said, smiling down at him cheshire before he put his head under her chin. This was a position that, if you looked at them both, you knew took some practical doing, but that they had quickly learned how to do. A reverse big spoon situation.

She hummed, and wrapped her arms around him, going over and not under his forearms. He closed his eyes.

“Hey, El,” she said after a moment, with a hum, a tone of a sudden thought. His eyes blinked open; it felt like he had been about to fall fake-asleep. “Why do you think we used to fuck?”

Oh. Well, he was awake now.

He tilted his head to look at her. “Not you too, Bambi,” he said, not too sadly. She smirked down at him.

“Obviously me too, you cute little bitch,” she said, with some delight. “Who’s better equipped to slog around in your issues? Don’t you dare say Coldwater, we both know I get jealous.”

“Fair,” he said, like he would if this were a real conversation. Then he sighed. “I don’t know, Margo. You’re hot. I’m hot. We got bored? God, it wasn’t even like, penis-in-vagina?”

She scrunched her face, quizzically, in a very theatrical way. “No, there was for sure penis-in-vagina,” she said mildly. Then she allowed, her head tilting, “Not always your penis.”

“Oh. Right. I did appreciate that.” He was smiling.

Margo rolled her eyes, very feelingly. “Okay, yeah, what this is? Is _not_ a horny mind-conversation. We’re on topic, okay? And that’s not a good enough concluding argument for the essay,” she decided. “Let’s big picture it. What is it about _you and fucking_ , Eliot?”

“Oh my god, literally, there’s no way in _hell_ ,” and Eliot was laughing, improbably, “that I am evolved enough to have this conversation with myself.”

Margo shrugged, with both her shoulders and her expression. She traced a finger down the front of his shirt, over the vest this projection of himself was obviously wearing. “Food for thought,” she said, mildly.

He did think about it, for a second. “I just can’t do anything more than fucking,” he said, knowing it wasn’t entirely true. Or he was trying to make it not-true, maybe? He didn’t know what it would look like in the real world, if Quentin would even care, and if Quentin didn’t care then what the fuck he would do with that for the rest of his life. Whatever.

“That’s all hypothetical,” said Margo, soothingly. He grinned at her, and her grip around him eased to stroke a hand in his hair, letting him close his eyes again.

“You need to think about this,” she said, sounding a little sad, like he had, earlier. “But maybe not right now. That other one was a lot, right?”

He nodded, so, so glad to be babied by his memory of her. She kissed his forehead, and he could feel the print of her lipstick on his skin. He closed his eyes, feeling his heart settle.

He woke to the dimmer light in the cottage, again, empty, not leaning back into Margo’s comfort. Charlton was asleep on the couch across from him, and the floor around the calendar was littered with slate-colored blackout days, an impossible amount that had not been there when he had last seen it.

“Charlton,” he said once he stood over him, shaking him. “Charlton—”

And Charlton fucking bolted up. “What, what is,” he said, “what the, was I, I was _asleep?_ ”

Eliot felt like he was being given a pop quiz he was about to flunk. “Yes…?”

“I do not _sleep,_ Eliot Waugh,” Charlton almost spluttered at him, suddenly with a crazed look about him.

“Uh,” was again for the umpteenth time that—uh, scratch that, in the past couple weeks, maybe, based on the calendar day thing? For the umpteenth time in _weeks,_ this was as articulate as he got.

Charlton sighed explosively, marching off toward the door, back again, off again, back. “What is happening?”

Eliot considered the most delicate way to put it, and found that there was not one. “I broke, um,” he said, “the structural integrity of the mind palace.”

“You _what,_ ” said Charlton, faintly.

“Maybe it wasn’t me? But, well, I’m kind of the only suspect for this round of Clue, _so…_?” Eliot shrugged, abjectly below the level of seriousness this situation called for.

Charlton shook his head. “How do you know this to be true? And I can _ascertain_ now that you do know this to be true.”

“You literally know I have no fucking idea, okay,” he said. “If I did maybe I would be actually jailbreaking.”

Eliot almost had included Charlton in that assessment of what he would be trying to do, but he had been avoiding in his mind the fact that his escape would mean that Charlton would just end. If he didn’t think about it maybe Charlton somehow would not know that he was not-not thinking about it.

Totally. Yeah. Really tracked.

“Listen, Charlton,” he said. “I think the creatures are maybe...gone? The shrieking Dementors?”

“ _Why would you ever call them that_ —” And then Eliot can see on Charlton’s face when he completely comprehended everything he had said. “They’re...gone.”

Eliot nodded, a little frantically.

“That’s not possible,” said Charlton, with the exact same information available to him that was available to Eliot, _holy shit,_ that was annoying.

“It’s actually super possible,” said Eliot, “in that it’s _just what’s happening?_ ”

Charlton shook his head, looking more and more like he thought he was going insane. Conceptually, it should have been funnier that Charlton had been kicking around for, what, _ever_ with only his own frame of reference and whatever else filtered in from the Monster’s past victims or the creatures, and also Ora dying horribly, but being Eliot’s roommate was somehow really what was taking a toll.

Eliot had a single at Brakebills.

“Listen,” said Eliot. “I don’t know how much time we have. Whatever’s going on now, I keep getting pulled into my own bullshit and time is passing in the world _out there_ , and there’s never been a way off that ride other than, like, a deluge of self-medicating and repressing, so unless you have any ideas—”

“I _don’t,”_ Fen sobbed, “I don’t, I don’t, I—”

She was gasping in a pile on the bed they sometimes shared at Whitespire. It had initially represented a prison to him, and then after a fashion, not even that long of a fashion, whatever duration of time that was supposed to mean, he found he liked Fen. And he enjoyed all kinds of physical closeness, really; he always had. And immediately all of this feeling seemed to surface in him, _physically_ , and he felt like falling forward.

And Fen cried on the bed, and cried, in the mourning clothes she had worn, around the time of the _log_.

He looked down at himself, distracted from the display by the fact that his mind had taken the time to change to his Fillory aesthetic, you know, swashbuckling king who liked patterns and men. Well. Clearly, this was doing things for his priorities.

When he looked back up at Fen, he realized her sobbing had stopped like a candle that had been snuffed, and her eyes were blank but wet. His mouth only just opened, like he already had been prompted for an explanation of himself.

“Really?” she asked. “This is really how I make my entrance?”

“Oh,” he started, looking around like she somehow might have been talking to someone else. “I’m...sorry?”

She shook her head, wiping under one eye, which did nothing for how puffy-wrecked her face was. It was the face of someone who was unashamed to feel pain, and who felt it deeply, which had once rendered her so cartoonish to him.

But that was unfair, maybe, maybe even to him. He loved Fen. He did. He extended his hand, to see if he had the ring on, even knowing the weight of it was there.

“You never do take it off,” she said. Then she blinked, making a face, almost pouting. “You’re really goddamn weird.”

“Speaking of a thesis, fake-Margo,” he said, with his shoulders slumping as he sat on the edge of the bed, “if you can hear me. Well, no, I guess she can.”

Fen sniffed. “And it is really, really shitty of you to imagine me this way,” she said. “Like, duh. I’m not here to feel pain just because you don’t think you can. _Super_ Midwestern straight guy of you.”

“No, yeah, you wouldn’t understand that particular cultural construct,” he said, a little hollow. “This one is really blatant.”

Fen just shrugged next to him, all _well, what can you do_. Then she stretched on the bed, laying down at the end of it and beside him, not looking at him but up at the ceiling. It was almost a Margo-ish pose, but maybe he just wanted that to be the lesson again.

“Maybe I’d be more in character if I was still crying?” she suggested, almost brightly.

Eliot tilted his head. “No,” he said, “now you’re getting there.” And then he looked down at her, making her meet his eyes. “So. Goal-oriented. Time-sensitive. What’s this object lesson about?”

She looked up at the ceiling again as if considering. Her hands folded over her chest, the position of them almost funereal, an absent thought that made him want to shudder, for some reason.

“You should have told me about the Quest. The mosaic,” Fen decided.

He blinked. “That’s _it?_ Wow. I just need to learn sharing?”

She shook her head, frowning. “I mean, _obviously_ , but. You should have told me, because...then you understood what it was like to lose a child, Eliot,” she said. “You only really understood after that even though you had already done it.”

“Oh,” he said. He stared out the window then, at the view of the Fillorian expanse that might have been as imperfectly recreated as everything else in his mind. The sky outside was cruelly white-blue.

“How can you even really think you’d like to be a dad if you’re planning on ODing on coke anyway? Or getting killed by battle magic or the apocalypse or whatever it was last time? I mean, come on,” Fen said, and he caught her eye-roll when he looked back at her. “You hadn’t made time to think about it when it first happened then it was gone.”

“Fen really shouldn’t talk about _cocaine_ ,” he said, letting himself be distracted by this, because, of course. He was frowning, now. He hated the idea of that touching Fen specifically.

“Excuse me, _I_ can do whatever _I_ want,” said Fen. “Believe it or not, I’m an adult. An actual person, even! And whatever I want is probably knives forever? Wow. Okay, fine. Eliot, do you really even know me at all?”

He shook his head. “I know you’re so brave,” he said. “And you’re really sweet even though you get really angry too. Like, _so_ angry. And you care about important things. And you’re not afraid to care about important things. I know you’re a really good person, Fen. You deserve better than whatever it is we have. Or had. I don’t even know what that’d be since I’m banished and...maybe dead, also.”

She pursed her lips, as if that was not quite satisfactory. “I’m sure I’d say thanks,” she said. “Given that I am Fen.”

“You are Fen,” he said, patiently. “And you do like knives.”

“I’m the daughter of a knife,” she said.

“Knife-maker’s daughter,” he corrected. She nodded in her place on the bed, and then she sighed, and she pulled herself up, to sit by him properly.

“Where do you feel it when you think about your children? Our daughter. Your son. Where is that in your body?”

Improbably, he automatically lifted his hand, like he was about to draw a sigil on his chest or start a spell or both, but of course, he was just gesturing right in the center.

“It’s here,” he said. “Always. Right here.” His hand pressed where he had put it. He felt his own heartbeat, steady enough, though none of this was real.

Fen mirrored his movement, as if trying the idea of the sensation on for size against her own, and sighed again.

“I wish I had really gotten to see you be a dad,” she said. “Not like you were for Fray for two seconds, but like really, be a dad. I definitely wanted that. And you know, I knew you were scared. But I thought you would be good at it eventually. And you were, Eliot. I wish you had told me how much you loved Teddy. I think it would have made me feel better. Maybe it still would. Or maybe it would be poking at a really old wound? I don’t know because you don’t really know.”

He shook his head. And he turned this over in his mind.

“I think,” he started, “I think you can only get away with calling yourself your own greatest creative project before you have kids. Probably, right?”

“ _Whoa_ ,” Fen said, her brows raising. He smiled, a little wryly.

“Yeah. I’ll have to work on another line for when I’m dramatically describing myself.” He looked up at the ceiling, made of stone, carvings inset high and art history-looking stuff he couldn’t possibly remember. “Which is. You know. Something I do often.”

“True,” Fen agrees, smiling at him. “I think I like that about you, too. We kind of go together that way.”

“Hey,” he said, deciding as he said it, “yeah. Yeah, wow. Fen, we really do.”

Her face looked less puffy now to him, and maybe even fond when she smiled. He didn’t know if he was imagining her evolving away from grieving mother-then-widow, or if it was a natural progression in his mind of how someone would look calming down from a crying jag. She leaned against him, warm, and he put an arm around her.

“Wait,” he said, lifting his hand, feeling lightness then seeing a lack on his finger, a thin band of skin that was paler and usually covered. “My ring. Where did—”

The smell of cinnamon, and the cottage again, him laying on a couch. Charlton stood in front of him, looking down at him, wide-eyed.

Eliot looked from his hand to Charlton, at a loss. “Where... did my wedding ring go?”

Charlton looked absolutely _frantic_. “How would asking _me_ help?” he said, with the same going-mad tone he had on previously.

This exact sentence tugged on something for Eliot, and he opened his mouth, not able to put it into words. Charlton shook his head, and turned, as if casting around for a different solution or a different person to offer it.

“Okay, back up, sorry,” Eliot said, having to rally the troops inside of himself without making more imaginary friends appear. “What exactly is happening from your perspective?”

“Darkness,” said Charlton. “Nothingness. You know how long I’ve been stuck, Eliot, and nothing like this has ever happened here. But you just saw—the other girl.” He must have been comparing her to Margo.

“Woman,” Eliot said, also correcting himself.

“ _Woman,_ ” said Charlton, impatiently, “you saw the other woman, the knife woman, Fen. About your children.”

“About...my children,” he said, slowly, dimly. “So you were there somehow.”

Charlton shook his head, and Eliot was vaguely reminded of how people treated him when he was being particularly stubborn as a child. “No, I most definitely was not, I just—I know what happened. Saw it, almost. I do not know that it matters. Eliot, you might be losing your chance to be _free._ ”

“Okay. How does that make any fucking sense? If you’re in a prison and the prison is, I don’t know, uh, literally _breaking_ —”

“You get crushed,” said Charlton, with a Charltonish tone of, _you imbecile_. “Things fall on you and you get crushed.”

They looked at each other, for a minute, and it was slow for it to dawn on Eliot. That Charlton wasn’t panicking for his own life, whatever it meant anymore. He was panicking because he somehow _cared,_ and not about what would happen to himself.

“Oh, shit,” said Eliot, his mouth hanging on it.

Charlton rended a hand in his hair and turned again, antiquely dramatic in a way Eliot would have been a little admiring of, maybe, you know, in other circumstances. And then it occurred to Eliot to look around; they were at a different vantage on the calendar and the pile of days. The _pile._

Gorge rose in his stomach, which didn’t technically exist.

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “If I broke our shit, there’s nothing that’s telling us it isn’t a good thing, right? What if I just kind of, uh, go back online outside?”

“You are, we are, in the mind of a _god_ ,” said Charlton. “You know there’s costs with gods. I don’t need to waste time telling you.”

Eliot smoothed a hand over his mouth. “Okay, so we’re fucked,” he said, his hand hanging on his chin, “and I’m going to spirit journey myself to death. Wow. This is exactly the opposite of how I wanted to die or even, I guess, be alive.”

“No,” said Charlton, visibly thinking, pacing a little, only to circle back in front of him. “No, that cannot be. I think it must be that—Eliot, that’s what got you to the door. Your door. That’s how this place works, how it takes its costs. The Monster is an ancient and terrible being who is trying to understand himself and cannot. So perhaps—perhaps that is what you must do, to survive, to leave this place. That is how we’ve been given this opportunity.”

Somewhere in this speech, Eliot’s mouth had, again, fallen open, as he stared at Charlton. They were almost, but not quite, of a height; Charlton was a couple of inches shorter. Charlton had an open face, and looked ambiguously young, in a hero-on-a-British-fantasy-show way.

“I wish you had gotten to be really fucking alive,” he said, “for a longer while.” He felt a similar stirring of honesty, or a removal of something, that he did when he was talking to his own projections of the people he knew.

Charlton, seeming surprised even though he could hear Eliot’s every thought, or however it was that he knew things, smiled a little.

“I don’t wish for that, anymore,” he said, but it wasn’t grim, somehow. “I’d come to terms with that long before we knew each other, because there’s no alternative, Eliot. There’s no alternative at all.”

That sounded like another shitty lesson for him, so it was appropriate that when everything disappeared around him again, it was Brakebills.

Specifically, it was Dean Fogg at the center of the admissions panel, who were all there, though he could not have possibly given less of a fuck about what those people looked like. One of them might have been his third grade teacher who hated him, for all he knew.

But again he glanced down at himself, immediately curious about his current interpretation of his baby-self aesthetic, then he got mad at this instinct, closed his eyes, and opened them on Fogg and all the other Important Adults looking at him levelly.

“Well?” said Fogg. “Show us what you can do.”

It was exactly what Fogg had actually said _then_ , and Eliot felt an internal wrinkle of confusion before he lost control of his body. With the entirely fake confidence of a younger version of himself, he drew his hands together, _clap,_ and at once from the bookshelves around the room, all the books pulled themselves out. With his hands still together, they hovered in the air, like about forty invisible librarians had been surprised into stillness while sorting books as he looked back around at his own handiwork, trying to stay impassive.

Fogg looked at him levelly, then glanced around the room, with apparent disinterest that bloomed into distaste. “We _know_ you can do this, Mr. Waugh,” he said, impatient. “You’re a classic telekinetic. We won’t even have to sort for your discipline. Oh, excuse me, I meant to say, if you can show us you’re worth our time and attention, well. _Then_ we won’t have to sort.”

Anxiety that was not at home in his current mind curled in his stomach, the _no, no, no_ of losing the shot at becoming any fucking thing other than himself, even though at that moment he had absolutely no idea what anything else that Fogg said meant.

Then Fogg grinned, easily, and produced a piece of paper. “Show us what you did to _this,”_ he said.

A little annoyed, for show, Eliot gave a bored gesture to send the books with a little clatter back into place before he stepped toward the table, squinting down at the paper.

It was his transcript. From Ivy Tech Community College, one of a few in Indiana. There were scattered C’s and one very special B on it, but mostly there were F’s, and in his last terrible semester: _W, W, W, W—Withdrawal, Withdrawal, Withdrawal, Withdrawal_.

When he looked up at Fogg’s face, feeling cold and hot at once, Fogg was smiling, impatience no longer an issue.

“This is not the document you presented to the school, what was it, an hour ago?” Fogg said, with a sarcastic mildness. Eliot of that time wondered if that whole sequence of being sent away to collect then produce his transcript had in itself been bullshit; Eliot of _now_ knew that was the case.

Eliot then, lost for words when he still rarely was, shook his head numbly. And then he put his hands over the paper and let his fingers flex, curl together with what felt like a glorious lack of effort, as he spoke words in what he would learn eventually was Sumerian—the first written language for the best forgery spell, _duh_.

And the paper changed, ink running, shifting, then resolving when his fingers stilled, the words stopped. It was from a different, same-level-of-prestige university than the one he had nailed last time, another one in the New York system. It had mostly A’s and all four years. There was even this time, cheekily, four sets of _Dean’s List_ notations on four separate semesters, when he squinted down, one of the _Cum Laudes_ that he would love to bill himself as basically just to say _Cum_ and leer a little.

Wow. Eliot was good at this.

He was leaned over it, and looked up at Dean Fogg, after a moment. Dean Fogg’s face was impassive, and the other non-Fogg adults looked alarmed, leaning into each other, _discussing_ amongst themselves.

Eliot made a very intentional decision to grin at all of them.

“Where did you get the spell?” said Fogg. Eliot, then, had hoped he sounded amused in a good way, but didn’t expect it.

Eliot rolled his neck, nearly bouncing on his feet, the feeling of used-power potent enough that it was almost true that he didn’t give a fuck?

“I Googled it,” he said, and it was true. And since he was, in that moment, sure he was not going to get to be in this school, he was not going to get to have magic, he added, “Uh. _Bitch._ ”

Fogg looked up at him, for a moment. Then he _laughed,_ the sound slow, gaining momentum, and maybe genuinely kind, somewhere deep down. Then he said, “Very good, Eliot. Very, very good.”

Then the other adults around Fogg disappeared. Outside the light seemed to dim, go non-Brakebills, making Eliot look up at once, yanked out of the past version of himself that felt too small now, too dull and angry, and god, had he really hurt that much? All the time? Was it really just like that all the time?

“Not all the time,” said Fogg kindly, still sitting behind the table. “And this was the day you got to meet Margo. Remember?” Fogg sighed and stood, rounding it slowly as Eliot backed away from it again. “Everything changed. For the better.”

He blinked, at Fogg. And again he looked down at himself, now able to finish his thought without getting annoyed at himself. “Do I actually have to look like this right now?” he asked Fogg by default, but really, he was just asking himself, so. “This was a fashion don’t.”

Fogg put up a _shut the fuck up_ hand that Fogg did often, in real, actual life. Eliot shut the fuck up.

“You’re a strong magician,” said Fogg thoughtfully, leaning himself against the table, on the other side of where he had just sat. “As I observed, apparently. Even more than that, you’re a very gifted telekinetic. Maybe one of the better of your generation, judged on one criterion. But not the strongest. Overall, everything weighed, not really a _Merlin_ of your time, not by far.”

“Okay, but Merlin was a fucking hack,” he said, an ancient default response no doubt bubbling up from being in a fake-Brakebills setting. Fogg held up a hand again. _Fine._

“And you have no mind for academic work, Eliot,” he said. “You could explain theory if you had a reason to, of course. And you do well enough solving problems in front of you, not too shabby with reasoning when lives are on the line, but you’re not actually remarkable at either one of those things. And to be clear, your community college transcript did not greatly differ from your Brakebills transcript, as it is. You fared better, but not too much. Though that was also _pre-forgery_.”

Eliot’s jaw set, in spite of himself, because this was all true.

“And, on top of _all_ of that, I can’t say you ever very ingeniously contributed to your social group’s attempts to avoid mass death, or the apocalypse, or, god, who can even keep up with your problems. So. What _is_ it that you’re good at?” said Fogg.

Eliot blinked at him. “Does everyone just have a key essay question for me, or?”

Fogg waved his hand, impatiently. “Think, since I know you can fucking do that,” he said. “Think of why you deserve to live.”

Oh.

“I don’t know,” said Eliot, before he could even _think,_ as Fogg had instructed him.

Fogg shook his head. “That’s not good enough, and you know it’s not,” he said.

Eliot was at a loss.

“I, I don’t deserve to live,” he said automatically, but suddenly the idea felt artificial, even though it also felt like it was as close to his bones as his skin. Then he laughed, sounding empty to his own ears. “I don’t know if I deserve anything?”

Fogg shook his head, again, the motion sharper this time. “No. Not good enough.” Then Fogg himself seemed to think, and for the first time he realized when he looked at these versions of the people he knew trying to come to some conclusion, it was really himself, trying to come to some conclusion.

He missed tripping. Magic acid definitely made more sense than this.

“What’s one thing you have done,” he said, “in spite of everything? You were beaten as a child, you murdered both a bully and the shell of a man you called a _boyfriend_ after, what, all of a week of knowing him? You nobly gave your life to sexless royal matrimony because you wanted to die, and then you could not even succeed at not getting _revolted against_ or _exiled_. You had one child who died before she lived. Then another child now also dead, lost, maybe erased. And still you turned away the only other person who knows that exact pain, out of fear. After all of this, what is the one thing you still have?”

He had to think for a second, if this was actually the correct order of events. Well. More or less. 

“I don’t fucking know,” he said.

“Eliot,” said Fogg, as if it were the easiest and clearest solution in the world, two plus two. “Eliot Waugh, you’re still _alive._ ”

Eliot couldn’t comprehend this thought, but it had come from himself.

“Do you think that’s worth something?” Fogg asked.

He shook his head, helplessly. “I don’t know if I do,” he said.

“I know you don’t,” said Fogg, a bit shortly again. “Let’s see if you last long enough to find out, shall we?”

And Fogg brought up his hands and clapped them together, like Eliot had in his memory of himself, and then Charlton stood over him, like he was the one waking him up this time.

Eliot let himself sink deeper into the plush of the couch he was on, sighing. “How is this less fun than when we were creature-dodging,” he asked, but not even with the tone of a question.

“There was at least an element of athleticism to that,” said Charlton, sounding annoyed, hands going to his hips in a pose that reminded Eliot of himself. He really was rubbing off.

“I am _not_ athletic,” said Eliot, nearly offended.

“You’re _really_ not, son,” his father said.

It was the kitchen of the house he had grown up in around him now, his father sitting at the dinged-up kitchen table that his mother was careful to have him eat at instead of the nice dining room with a china set from HSN, the fridge that had a buzzing light and a dedicated drawer of beer, and, what. What. Sorry, was his mind really doing this?

“ _For fuck’s sake,_ ” Eliot said, turning, and his father laughed. It was never a kind sound and was often a concussive thing, spitting sudden sound into tense silences, ramping up the expectation of being hit.

But Eliot wasn’t a little boy anymore. And this wasn’t even fucking real.

“Okay, please,” said Eliot. “Can we skip through this? Just, like, say some shit to me about football or something. Then probably about being a real man. Call me some dusty slurs that I will, we can all stress this now, use to describe myself in a few years. Then we’re done here?”

His father raised his brows.

“No?” said Eliot. “Yes? Done? Incredible! Eat shit and die.”

And he turned and walked out of the back door, which took right back into the kitchen, in front of his father.

His father folded his arms in his amused regard of him, and Eliot was sick to feel that the gesture was familiar, that something of him was like something of his _literal villain dad_.

“I processed you, _bitch_ ,” he said. “I processed the fuck out of you because I didn’t have a choice. Then I fed you to _cannibals_. We’re five stops past done.”

“You loved me,” his father said.

Eliot was drawn up silent.

“Once,” his father allowed. “Definitely not anymore. You hope not, at least. But that’s why it hurt in the first place, that you were such a goddamn disappointment.”

On Eliot’s continued silence, his father leaned forward. “I could tell something was wrong about you from when you were real little. You know, that you were queer. You’re right, though, we don’t really need to go over all of that,” he said, on a little aw-shucksy kind of grin that made Eliot’s stomach churn.

“But there were good times that you remember. Just barely, but they’re all where we are. When I seemed so tall and put you on my shoulders. When I would tuck you in,” his father said. “Some nights.”

“When you slapped me because I didn’t get your fucking bottle opener fast enough,” said Eliot, almost bored.

His father grinned, still.

“Truths don’t have to be one thing or the other, Ellie,” he said, and that nickname from his father had been affectionate, at some point. Where that affection went, ever, Eliot didn’t know. “I beat you, called you every name in the book. Pretty merciless, wasn’t I? But I was kind to you, too. So those two things, they came out of the same person. That’s why you’re still afraid of me.”

And it wasn’t like the other times, when he waited for the projected memory to get to the point. He knew the point his father was about to make. He knew it and he hated it.

“You know it’s possible to feel like you love someone, even to _act_ like you love someone, and to turn right around and just about _murder_ them,” said his father, voice light. “Or make them near kill themselves. There’s no logic to it. There’s no way to tell if someone’s going to hurt you, or if you’re going to hurt someone. That’s what I really taught you, kiddo.”

Then, his father sighed. “Of course, your mom got to be a saint to you even for a couple years after you left home.” He shook his head. “Almost unfair how long it took you to understand that she let it happen, too. That what you mean with your _processing,_ Ellie?”

Eliot just shook his head, numbly.

“I’m not fucking like you,” he said, knowing it couldn’t be entirely true, and wanting to cut it all out of himself for the first time in years. “I’m an asshole, and I’m addicted to, I don’t know, maybe every fucking substance ever, and I’m a fuck up, and I hurt good people for no reason. All of that, all of that shit is wrong with me! But I’m still _not you_.”

His father straightened, seeming taken aback. “Oh? You sure about this, now?” Eliot wasn’t, but. “Where’s your proof?”

And what happened next, it was almost like Logan Kinnear, the gentlest brush of Eliot’s thought changing reality. But this time, in the unreality of his old kitchen, the horizon line of farmland outside of the windows, his father disappeared.

Teddy as he was as a child appeared, sitting on Eliot’s old kitchen table, in his old house.

Eliot’s mouth fell open.

“Sweetheart,” he said, and it felt like his heart was bursting with love he didn’t realize he’d been holding on to. And his voice was soft, gentle, as he went to pick up Teddy, to lift him and hold him in his arms, a little desperately. “Hey, sweetheart.”

“Papa,” Teddy said, sounding confused. Of course Teddy wouldn’t be there to lecture him. “Are you alright?”

“I will be, honey,” he said, and he pressed his face into Teddy’s hair, breathing in. It didn’t even matter that they were in his, what, dumbass trauma kitchen.

His son wrapped his arms around Eliot’s neck, like he used to when he was tired.

“I love you so much,” Eliot said, like a promise to Teddy and himself.

“You’re good to me, Papa,” he said. Eliot’s mind couldn’t help but catch on the present tense, a kindness, a thoughtfulness he was somehow giving to himself. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried,” said Eliot, soothing automatically, stroking his back up and down.

Teddy nodded up at him, sleepily, then put his head further down on his shoulder. And Eliot didn’t know what to do, except to walk the familiar path from the kitchen, up the stairs. It was well-worn from him sneaking down to steal food at night, alone and free, maybe finding zebra cakes his mom meant to put in his lunch. And again, this was true about him being a kid, right alongside abject fucking terror.

He passed his parent’s bedroom, not thinking to be afraid of it, and went to his own, nudging the door open with his foot. And it was familiar to settle Teddy down so, so gently, to get him in under the starry-print sheets and blanket Eliot’s mom had let him pick out one year. He tucked him in with Teddy barely still awake.

“Goodnight, papa,” said Teddy, and of course, Eliot was back in the cottage.

He was standing up like he had flickered back from one moment to the next, and Charlton stood in front of him, looking taken aback, alarmed. The moment stretched, both of them staring.

“Eliot,” he started slowly, gently, “are you—”

Eliot shook his head. He was so tired. They needed a plan, or something, but he was so tired.

“As I’ll ever fucking be, yes,” he said, not needing to be asked about being okay.

Charlton shook his head. “I’m not so sure that was productive,” he said, and did he sound kind of, what, _protective?_

“How the hell is any of this _productive_?” Eliot asked, even though he knew the answer, by now. “I’m just wallowing in my own shit in my own head.”

Charlton nodded, once, apparently deciding not to press the issue. “You loved your son very much,” he said. Then he said, “Excuse me. You _love_ him very much.”

Eliot’s mouth opened, and closed.

Then Charlton, apparently suddenly distracted by something, turned his head from Eliot. Eliot watched him squint.

“Is it just me, or did your husband _cut_ his _hair?”_ Charlton asked.

And, feeling an odd sensation of something dropping, impossible after what had just happened, Eliot turned his head, too.

And there was Quentin.

“Oh,” Eliot said. “Oh, no.”

Because it was Quentin as he had last been in the real world, in a different button-up, and probably different jeans, and the same shorter hair. More lines in his face, probably. Not more smile lines, like he deserved.

Eliot turned toward him helplessly, and Quentin didn’t move except to, after a second, roll his eyes, maybe fondly.

“Yeah. Hey, asshole,” said this Quentin.

And Eliot was overwhelmed, remembering as he took slow steps toward Quentin, who tracked his movement with some, he didn’t know, amusement? Some amusement. He rounded this version of the man he loved and looked him up and down, and thought of how much more confident he was now. There was an easy wariness there, that maybe Eliot would have, too, if he wore the Quest the same way that he knew even under all of his own bullshit that Quentin did.

This was wasting time, it had to have been wasting time, but Eliot was stricken.

“Q,” he said.

And it didn’t feel like it did with his other conjured version of Quentin: it felt like thinking about everything about Quentin that was good in a real, true way. His bravery, his kindness. How he was able to take things and grow from them, even when he was so unhappy, when he had known Quentin through several fuzzily-remembered periods where he couldn’t get out of bed for what was happening in his brain.

And then, finally, how fucking angry Quentin must have been with him. What would it even mean, if he got out, if he said anything at all?

“Don’t do that,” said Quentin, suddenly standing taller, less easy. “That’s really, uh. Okay, what would Margo say?”

“Cocking out,” said Eliot, a bit tonelessly.

“Cocking out,” this Quentin agreed, smiling, then extending a hand, not to take his but to gesture him somewhere— “Okay, come on, stop looking at my ass, let’s go.”

Then Eliot didn’t have time to wonder if it meant something that Quentin was the only one who showed up to give him a warning, if you didn’t count the Taylor horror movie sequence, he didn't have time to do anything, because:

It was dark. The other cottage of his life stood to their left, the mosaic in front of them. Lit by fire.

The weather was warm and balmy; earlier that night in when this had happened—this was one of Eliot’s less-fuzzy memories—Quentin had said he thought the weather was turning cold soon, that Fillory’s sporadic and distressingly _Game of Thrones_ warm season was winding down. They had both exchanged worried looks of equal unspoken, like, _oh fuck, cold, resources, we don’t know shit,_ even though it turned out that when they put their heads together they kind of did _._ But Quentin had said something conciliatory, and Eliot had been pleasantly surprised when he maybe leaned his shoulder into his, a little? Not that they didn’t touch, they touched.

And then further that night, more notably, Quentin had said, _“Hey,”_ and then Quentin kissed him.

“I totally planned all of that,” said the latest Quentin update, hands on his hips, ducking his head on a smile.

“Yeah,” said Eliot, an acknowledgment he wouldn’t have been able to give in the real world, before this. “Yeah, we talked about that later. I remember things like that more.”

He rubbed at his mouth, maybe thinking of kissing, which he didn’t want to do with this version of Quentin.

“Come on,” said Quentin, and when he met his eyes, he wasn’t smiling but was definitely still amused. “It’s basically, like, masturbating? Get the fuck over yourself.”

It was not possible that he really, healthily thought that. Also it was definitely a lot weirder than masturbating. Even _Eliot_ had enough of a grasp on the sexual realities of most people to know that.

“Oh, I am _historically_ unable to do that,” he countered. He noticed then—their drinks on the ground, on the mosaic. He bent over the little scene, his feet planted next to the expanse where the tiles fit and were currently nearly unfinished. This had been their _mosaic anniversary_ , but fuck if it wasn’t the first time that the both of them fell asleep without finishing it for the day.

Quentin was quiet, but then Eliot felt it like a change in air pressure when he moved behind him, then took a step on to the stone base of the mosaic before he sat down, folding himself like he had on the night of.

He was turned to Eliot, not even that showily, and smiling again, before he patted the space beside him. “Old times’ sake?” said Quentin.

Eliot narrowed his eyes at him. “No way are you _this_ confident now, _Quentin Coldwater_ ,” he said.

“What if you _want_ me to be?” was his reply, his eyes narrowing a little in return. Well. Touché.

Eliot did sit beside him. He didn’t try to imitate himself that night; he just sat down how he sat down. He went to roll his sleeves up and found they were already rolled. His wedding ring had returned.

“That small detail stuff,” said Quentin, starting thoughtfully. “Maybe we don’t need to worry about it? I don’t know if it means too much, El.”

“It has to, right? Or what’s the point?” Eliot said this, but was staring at his ring finger.

“Sure,” said Quentin, “okay, fine, we’ll come back to it, maybe. But, well. What’s what you’ve been doing with me if not just, I don’t know, upgraded fantasy _jerking off?_ ”

“Jesus Christ,” said Eliot, on a laugh in spite of himself, seeing that Quentin’s expression was warm still. And Quentin just grinned wider.

“No, definitely not this confident,” decided Eliot.

“You don’t actually know that _now_ ,” was Quentin’s counterpoint, with just, did he raise a brow, just a little?

“Wow, please stop making me horny. Okay, both of us, focus.” And Quentin laughed then, too, still a memory of Q that was very, very generous.

But then he just looked at him, and after another moment, Quentin’s brow raised again, and. He was waiting on an answer to his question.

“Oh,” said Eliot, leaning forward a little, his hands gathering in his lap. “Right. It’s not _jerking off_ because—“

A too-long pause.

“Uh-huh. Because what?” Quentin prompted, and Eliot somehow noticed, really noticed and felt, the patience in his tone.

“It’s really obvious, and you know it’s really obvious, because you’re a figment of my imagination, Q,” he said.

Quentin grinned. “Nope. You gotta say it. Enlighten me,” he said. Wow, Eliot had somehow gotten very good at out-bullshitting himself. Okay.

Eliot looked out into the woods beyond the clearing. He had felt so safe here. The Physical Kid’s cottage had given him a rubric for what a home could be like. But this was where he had been drawn up short in terror, further into whatever this endeavor initially was with Quentin, with realizing he felt _safe._ The word for what this place made him feel was _safe._

He shook his head, feeling a crease form at his own brow. “Q, it’s always,” he started, and a note of something else snuck into his voice, thick and odd-toned, “it’s always about you wanting me.”

Quentin seemed to digest this. “So let me get this straight. You’re hot for...uh... _consent_...now?” he said.

Eliot wanted to shove at him, which was giving too much into the fantasy. He just shook his head. “Don’t be an asshole,” he said. “I mean, though, yes. But no. I don’t—if the _you_ in the real world wouldn’t want this to be happening, then it can’t happen. That’s pretty, um, straightforward. I think.”

“You know, I seem to recall I used to love it happening,” said Quentin, casually enough. “I’m...holy shit. Maybe I’m kind of a slut?”

“Oh my fucking _god,”_ said Eliot, pressing his palms to his face, and Quentin laughed at him, again.

And then he leaned back, regarding Eliot. “I might not be in love with you anymore,” he said, making Eliot look at him. “Or maybe I am, but it’s too fucked up to do anything with.”

Eliot felt the inside of his chest seize, then release, then felt nothing at all. “I know,” he said.

“But I always wanted you,” he said. “You were just scared I’d stop.”

“You _did_ stop,” he said, knowing it was unfair before it even came out of his mouth. His voice was thick again. “You got married, Quentin.”

Quentin was looking at him the way he did when they both knew Eliot was full of shit, but Quentin was too nice to really go into it. “Oh. Right. Wow. Speaking of consent,” he said, lightly. “God, Eliot. We fucked like, seriously, _deranged rabbits_ and shared a bed and a life for literal years and you didn’t want to, I don’t know, what would kids our age say these days? _Define the relationship._ ”

“I know,” said Eliot.

“And then you said it was fine if I married Arielle,” he said. “And you know it didn’t make a difference to me. That it wouldn’t change anything for me, for us, even if we couldn’t get married, too. You know I loved you—”

“I _know,_ ” said Eliot, angry now. “I said it was _fine,_ I always, it was never more than fucking _fine,_ Jesus, Quentin.I loved you, I love you, but before it happened I never said that I loved the idea of you getting married. Never once. I _never_ pretended that hard. That I remember, that, that’s crystal fucking clear for me. I never even said that I _just wanted you to be happy._ Even though,” and he was suddenly _terrified_ of himself, “I do, I want you to be happy—”

“El,” said Quentin, cutting him off, in a quieting but sympathetic tone. And Eliot’s mouth closed, opened again, and suddenly he was breathing unsteadily, almost gasping.

The Quentin who was more Quentin than his other version, his cut-the-crusts-off version, just watched him as his breathing leveled, as he made himself sit up ramrod straight, clutching his hands into fists in his lap like he was about to use them for a spell. It was so hard to see so much sympathy in Quentin’s face but Eliot kept looking at him. They kept looking at each other.

“Maybe I don’t want you,” said Quentin, consideringly. “Not now, after everything. But Eliot, honey...” And the name was like a dagger, in this context, but Eliot couldn’t think of it. It would become hard to breathe again.

“Eliot,” Quentin started again, “we’ve been through a literal lifetime of shit together, like, more than one. And I think...I think I’m always going to be here for you.”

The forests of Fillory were dark and deep, beyond the firelight. Miles to go, or something. Obviously he’d flunked AP Lit.

Quentin was waiting for a moment, beside him, even though he was part of his mind and obviously knew how he was going to react already. Eliot realized he could hear the same little sounds that had been omnipresent at the mosaic, blurring together, probably, with memories of rural stillness from his childhood: noise like trilling cicadas. Breeze stirring trees. A sense of being alone that he and Quentin had filled up, at first, just together.

Then Quentin said, “Do you really believe what I just told you?”

Eliot shook his head numbly, unable to speak for a second. He had to swallow.

“Nothing good stays for me, Q,” he said.

“I stayed,” Quentin said, but Eliot just shook his head, again, helplessly.

“It ended,” he started, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop, it was all just coming out of him. “I didn’t even know it ended because I fucking died and that was it, and then there was that, what, five seconds we didn’t remember anything. But, Q, Jesus Christ. I won for once. I got a happy ending. I know that happened. I _know_ it. But I can’t even really remember it now, I think, I don’t know how my brain would even handle it, how would anyone’s brain handle remembering _dying,_ and I’ve even done it more than once. And then that satisfied the Quest, I guess, I don’t even, I don’t even understand what happened after that, because I made it so we couldn’t talk about it, and the prize is that it all _never even fucking happened._ ”

Quentin was quiet for a moment. Quiet sounds breathed in the air between them.

“It happened,” Quentin said easily. “Just like this is happening. You’re feeling it, so it’s happening.”

“It’s not,” and Eliot was crying, helpless, angry tears, shaking his head insensibly, “it’s _not_ that fucking simple.”

Quentin’s mouth pressed together, and he leaned further back, his hands flat on the mosaic’s base, like he was looking up at the sky. Almost like he was looking politely away. And Eliot couldn’t stop crying, like a dam had burst, sobs hitching harder in his chest because he tried to push it down. It hurt.

“Hey, come on. Please look up, El,” said Quentin. And Eliot thought in a rush, of course he wouldn’t imagine Quentin looking away from him, not really, and he tilted his face skyward.

There were stars, a vast expanse of inky black with the light of fire so close, pinpricks of light. And it was something impossibly large and real that wasn’t himself; somehow, this was comforting, and he could let his breathing slow, on smaller and smaller sobs.

“Just like when you were a little kid, right,” Quentin said then. “This calmed you down so much. Do you remember that?”

The stars. Starry sheets and blankets.

Eliot shook his head once, a jerky motion, because he really didn’t remember, even though he felt stupidly childlike. Like, he _was_ crying. And he scrubbed hard at his face, making his own feeling of being pathetic increase, sniffed hard. Quentin was silent.

The feeling under the anger was fear. He felt it as a pit in his stomach still, not quite soothed by the fake night sky he imagined for himself.

“You do want me to be happy,” Quentin allowed. “It’s okay, Eliot.”

Eliot just shook his head again, at a loss for words, not knowing how to answer that. Because it wasn’t quite true. He was so fucking selfish, and Quentin never understood—

“I was happy,” he said, dully and not even quickly, not even with the rush of admitting something terrible, he wasn’t that good of a person, “when Arielle died.”

Quentin’s expression didn’t change. It was even, maybe still with a hint of sympathy. “You weren’t happy,” he said, and now he hated the patience in that tone, the impossible safety some part of him still stupidly believed he would get here, talking to Quentin, even when it was closer to the real thing.

“Part of me was _happy,_ ” he said, almost spitting it. “Maybe it was little but it was there. God, what if that’s worse? Like, I can’t even commit to being awful, Jesus, that’s, that’s hysterical. But I thought it, Quentin. You would never in your whole fucking life think _anything_ like that.”

Quentin’s expression finally changed. Impossibly, he laughed, again.

Eliot stared at him, the going-mad-feeling coming back. And Quentin ducked his head on his laugh, kindly enough.

“I’m sorry,” Quentin said, the laughter still in his voice. “I’m sorry, uh, I know, this is, this is serious, but—Eliot. God. You have seen me at my worst, probably? I basically ignored you being fucked up about Mike. You remember _that_ , right? Oh, and I mean, I brought Alice back _wrong_. That’s literally something bad that happened on Buffy! And we had, wow, I can’t believe I didn’t think of this first, we’re right here—we had so many _stupid, stupid_ fights even before we could really say we were like a married couple on the Quest. Where I apologized for being a shitty dumbass and not listening to you about, like, types of goddamn tree bark? Not all of that was you, El! And you, you fucking chose me. Every day.”

Eliot knew logically that Quentin was not perfect. That was about where that train of thought ended.

“I haven’t always been kind to you, Eliot. And you stayed,” Quentin went on. “And I’ll say it again. I stayed, too.”

Eliot bowed his head, and stared down at a blank patch on the mosaic base, then. He reached down, like he was doing it idly, and spread his fingers on it; the stone was warm, a little dewy, like something that came from the earth wholesale.

“I wasn’t just happy when she died,” he said, drawing back from how comforting that felt, touching the stone. “I thought—” It was so terrible, it felt like his throat would close.

He was aware that Quentin leaned forward, his legs folding, like he was trying to look at Eliot’s face. “Hey. You do have to say it,” he said.

“When she got really sick, really sick, when it was clear that she was probably _going_ to die, I thought—I would have you alone again, with Teddy. And I was happy about that, too. God, I wasn’t even young anymore, not really, not how we are now, we’re, we’re _babies_ , you know that, Q. And I was still like, child-with-toy-taken-away. Then she really fucking _died._ ”

It had felt like it was his fault, when Arielle died, like that secret, terrible part of him that was still _jealous_ even when Quentin still looked at him with such warmth and they never stopped fucking had willed it into happening. Would Quentin make him say that, too?

Quentin made a noise like a hum, and he sat back, again. “What if,” he said, “what if you’re not the one worst thought you ever had? Like, what if that’s not all there is about you? About us.”

Eliot blinked, and looked at him. “I cannot possibly have formulated that concept with my own brain,” he said.

Quentin smiled at him, suddenly. “Well, _you’re so good at magic, honey,_ ” he said, a clear razzing if Eliot had ever heard one.

“Oh, _fuck off_ ,” he said, automatically. Again Quentin’s smile got wider, dimpled, and Eliot felt something, he felt so much, of course he did.

“So you thought some fucked up stuff,” said Quentin, with a little confirming nod. “Some really fucked up stuff. Right. But you never said it, did you? You never put it on me. Maybe you should have so I could have told you you were a dumbass. And Eliot—you thought all of this bullshit, and we never talked about any of it. Maybe we never talked about anything? Not really, anyway. Then you died, and the Quest ended, because maybe we _still_ did the beauty of all life?”

Eliot didn’t have a reply but didn’t feel quite muted, chastened, like he had when the lesson had come back around, with the other inhabitants of his head.

“How much better would it be if we _did_ talk? I mean...do you think we can one-up ourselves?” Quentin was thoughtful again. Then, he said, “The beauty of all life all over again, but we both will fucking know better. _That’s_ proof of concept.”

Eliot didn’t have an answer for him and couldn’t, again, believe he was the originator of the thought, just looking at him. Because he was trying to imagine something better or truer than their fifty years together. It seemed impossible.

Then Quentin glanced off, like something troubling had distracted him, in the distance. When Eliot followed his gaze, there were only trees.

“El,” he said. “El, you’re, it’s like you’re bleeding through?” For some reason, it was like he was asking him even though Eliot had no clue what the fuck he was talking about.

“What the fuck,” _are you talking about,_ was going to be the very direct thought-to-voice question, but then Eliot was, Eliot was in his body.

But he wasn’t the one _inhabiting_ it.

He felt so much pain, clouding over everything, almost like the memory of being himself those years ago but, fuck, worse, so much worse, this was agony, existing was agony. It was barely _existing_.

But at the same time he couldn’t understand it, the immensity of the shape of it, like being a kid pulling up a skinned knee. It was the feeling right before you started to cry if you were going to cry at all. _Why do I hurt?_

But Quentin was standing right in front of him. And it broke through the haze of nonsensical pain, _I want I want I want,_ and he touched Quentin’s chest, hand on his shoulder as if to keep him in place, even as his mouth was forming words about getting rid of a corpse. The Monster had killed someone and there was the body. The thought came and left his mind— _the Monster’s mind_ —like if he’d killed a spider.

There was vast emptiness but too much all at once, he could feel everything that existed, he could pluck out anything he wanted to. He had all this power and he just wanted to stop hurting.

And he wanted Quentin; the Monster thought and Eliot thought at the same time, _Quentin._ Quentin was inhumanly still, not meeting their eyes, with a look on his face neither he or the Monster could comprehend. Not really, not in that second. Even though the Monster had just tried to make sense of it with his conciliatory, “ _—gross corpse out of your sight—_ ”

And the Monster curiously, in the spare seconds, felt where he could gouge out Quentin’s heart, right under his fingertips. The space felt near-electrically charged, _I want I want I want_ , and Eliot bent double, still sitting down, and threw up next to the mosaic.

He had become aware again just in time to fumblingly lean over and back. He gagged helplessly, the echo of pain rattling through him, the echo of—

“Quentin,” he gasped, shaking his head, “ _Quentin_ , oh my fucking god, no, no, no no no,” and tears sprang from his eyes again, one more incomprehensible layer on top of everything.

This Quentin was on him immediately, on his knees on the mosaic in front of him, a hand on his back. “Hey, hey, no, you’re back now,” he said, with some urgency, “you’re back, that wasn’t you, you didn’t want that.”

Eliot shook his head again more violently, even though Quentin brushed back hair that felt sweaty, wiped something from the corner of his mouth with his thumb.

“Oh my god, oh, fuck. You hate me so much, you hated _it_ so much,” he said, almost sobbed, and his stomach turned over again but he ignored the lurch in his panic, “it was, it was _touching_ you like, like, because of _me_ , it was because, baby _, no, please,”_ and his face had crumpled, and for a second he lost sense.

The Quentin that still wasn’t Quentin pulled him forward and gathered him up, and Eliot was far gone past not allowing it. He stayed like that for a while, useless in Quentin’s arms, until he almost felt like his body was about to go limp.

And that was when he made himself sit up. Quentin’s grip on him eased then released, and when he sat back down they were just next to each other, at the mosaic again. Any stirring in the air, the hint of a coming autumn chill under the balm, made Eliot aware that he’d cried more where his face was wet.

Quentin had his knees pulled under him but now it was in a weirder, more Quentin way, he was distracted to notice. He swallowed.

“Is that the only time that’s happened? This, right now. Was that the first time?” he asked.

“I don’t think so, no, El,” Quentin said. “I don't, I don't know that that was even the present. Whatever’s letting you do this, is—”

Right then, Eliot didn’t actually give a fuck about the worldbuilding, so fuck you to whatever part of him was trying to explain this.

“No, Q,” he said, with some heat, “if I can’t get out, my body has to die. I want myself to die.” He looked at Quentin, as if he could give the instruction to him in the real world, back to tilting at windmills. “I wish you’d killed me. I can’t be the one hurting you anymore, Q, especially not, not like that. Never ever like that. Please.”

Quentin just looked at him for a minute, then sighed, and shook his head. Then he stood up. “Come on,” he said again, reaching his hand to help him up, and again, and Eliot was getting really fucking tired of this, it was—

The day when he broke free, now with two variations on Quentin. This made the effect eerier, the scene frozen with Eliot’s projection of Quentin standing by something that was only memory, inanimate just then.

Quentin looked at the memory-Quentin, then looked down at himself like Eliot had been doing with his own self, a little critically. “Nice, um. Extrapolating, El…?” he said, almost delicately.

“Fuck off,” said Eliot again, somehow, still, even though it was numbed out this time.

And everything was more like a dream for Eliot than ever, so it took a moment for him to realize the exact second it was frozen on.

“You kept trying to go back to you _dumping me,_ ” said Quentin. “What about this? You didn’t, uh, watch this one as much.” There was a barely-hidden non-comment on everything wrong with him there, but. But.

It was Quentin’s face when it was cleared with the realization that Eliot was really the one talking, when Eliot made him realize, it was _him._

And then, making Eliot start, the scene began to play. Alice moving behind him that he didn’t register, Julia’s shock and incomprehension, and, uh, two randoms—

“ _Eliot?_ ” said Quentin in his memory, the hope in his voice cutting through Eliot anew, and suddenly so much more horrible. And like Quentin always did, he stepped toward Eliot, no matter how badly he had hurt him.

Even though he wasn’t inhabiting this memory, he could almost feel the magnetic pull of the light in Quentin’s eyes, he had wanted to kiss him because there wasn’t time to think if Quentin wanted that or not. Then the scene stopped all at once again, in that place of possibility before Eliot had gotten pulled back into his mind.

Quentin rounded the frozen version of himself right in front of frozen Eliot, sticking his hands in his pockets, considering his own face. “Hey. I think I still might have a crush on you,” he said.

“Stop fucking with me,” said Eliot, dully. “If I didn’t just experience the worst fucking thing in my entire life, which has been, let’s review, terrible, I would...make you both kiss and then. Do stuff.”

Quentin shook his head. “You really wouldn’t,” he said. “You’re basically a prude, El.”

“No one has ever accused me of being such a thing,” said Eliot, with no energy left for full theatrical affront to go along with his words, his tone staying flat. “Thank fuck this isn’t real.”

Quentin’s expression was still light, even though all of that had just happened, even though, and he moved closer to Eliot, to stand in front of him. He didn’t know what this meant for how he thought of Quentin. He was tired of analyzing this. Maybe he was just tired. Maybe if he laid down in this piece of frozen highlight reel and closed his eyes, he would get beautiful, indulgent Margo again, and rich, unreal sunlight.

“Do you want me and you to kiss right now?” Quentin asked him, knowing the answer, of course.

Eliot shook his head, his mouth pulling a little flat. “It’s just no good if it’s not really you, Q,” he said.

Quentin was so transparently pleased with this response that he beamed up at him. “That’s really romantic,” he said. “Like. Do me a favor. Try to remember saying that when you get out of here?”

“If,” Eliot said, just to hear him argue.

“When,” said Quentin, because Quentin would. And all at once, Eliot hurt with how much he loved him.

And Quentin went on, “And _when_ you get out of here, even if we don’t get the happiest ending, I want you alive, Eliot. Nothing else—all of this _bullshit_ , all of this hurting. If we’re both alive, we can come back from it.”

“Wait,” said Eliot. And there was a dawning, patient smile on Quentin’s face, but he repeated himself, “Wait.”

“Go on,” said Quentin, with some delight.

“I’m alive so I can come back from this,” he said. “And that counts. For something. That’s why, that’s why I count for something.”

“That’s why anyone counts, Eliot,” Quentin said. “I do love that you can think of this after, god, how old even are we now?”

“Your 20s and your 70s are very similar,” said Eliot, full of shit, and Quentin laughed, a little, looking off for a second.

“El, you don’t want me to die for you,” he said. “Why would I want you to die for me? If anything else was ever, ever possible. No matter how hard it was?”

Eliot just shook his head, but weirdly, he was smiling. He was smiling? And then Quentin took a step closer to him, mirroring the frozen version of themselves beside them.

“Are you ready?” Quentin said, reaching to touch his elbow like he was about to guide them somewhere. “Something’s about to happen, maybe, I think?”

“What,” said Eliot, back in the cottage again, the other cottage in daylight, and Quentin was gone.

Quentin was gone.

And it was again like a dam had burst in him—this was how he was when he cried, it went on and off for, like, hours, like he was re-feeling every single bad thing that ever happened to him. Tears came back all at once, and he felt incredibly stupid. But this was what this was now and he had to deal with it. He scrubbed his face again.

“Charlton,” he called, around thickness in his throat. “Charlton?” Damn, he’d never really committed to making _Charlie_ stick.

For a moment there was silence, then he heard the footsteps from upstairs, and took a breath he didn’t know he’d been holding.

“Eliot,” Charlton’s voice as he bounded down, sounding out of breath. “Eliot, something is happening.”

“Yes, I have that memo,” he said. He hadn’t even bothered looking at the calendar days; it was like dead leaves scattered in the cottage’s den.

“Do you think we can understand more clearly than that?” Charlton said, for once seeming less know-it-all. Eliot realized, with this happening, they were about on the same level of expertise, and Charlton’s connection direct to his unconscious and also conscious was maybe not even super helpful anymore.

Eliot shook his head, not bothering to think that Charlton knew he didn’t know. He meant to say one thing, but what came out of his mouth was, “ _Perhaps you can tell me, do I have a name?_ ”

And the idea of, his whole mind consumed by, _Sister—_

Charlton gaped at him.

And the sound of his voice saying it—he shuddered almost convulsively then, nearly losing his own footing. Charlton grabbed for his arms, steadying him, staring at him.

“Eliot,” he said, both of them terribly knowing what had just happened.

“Charlton,” he said, suddenly desperate, “Charlton, I don’t fucking want to die.”

The feeling of it was foreign but steadying and terrifying at once, the weight of it. The weight of wanting to be alive.

Holy shit. _Eliot wanted to be alive._

More than when he had found the door, the door to Quentin and Margo and the land of the living that had also been the door to their family’s home, more than when he had promised his memory of Quentin that if he was braver, it was because of him. Eliot wanted to be alive more than anything else he’d ever wanted. More than he wanted Quentin, impossibly, to want him back.

Because that didn’t happen if he wasn’t _alive_.

“There must still be a door,” said Charlton. His hands were still on Eliot’s arms. “We can find it again.”

Eliot didn’t really believe that. The door had been something he got in exchange for pain, which was how the world worked, as far as he knew, not just some, like, fucked up god shit.

“There’s no fucking point to any of this if I just die,” he said. “There’s nothing for Quentin. There’s nothing for Margo. At least I won’t, I won’t be aware of it, I guess?” But what did that matter?

He almost wanted to think that there wasn’t a point to wanting to get out of this if not for Quentin and Margo, and maybe even all the rest of their fucked up _friends,_ but no. It was for Quentin and Margo that he had to want to get back for the sake of just, just living. Just, like, fucking trying to be a person. He couldn’t want to live just because of them or for them.

It dawned on him then, and he realized, he was maybe the biggest fucking dumbass who had ever lived, maybe that was how he was best distinguished as a person.

Because it had to be _him_. Eliot had to do this for himself.

“Jesus shitting Christ,” said Eliot, numbly.

And then it all made a sadistic sort of sense. The _preparation_. The disappearance of his most indulgent fantasies. Lessons.

With the bottom dropping out of his stomach, he looked at Charlton, shaking his head, and Charlton let his hands fall from Eliot finally, taking a step back.

“Right. That seems right. I have to let go. I can’t _be_ anymore,” Charlton said, easily enough. He nodded once, almost solemn, and he seemed very calm. “So I was wrong, I think. Everything has to be broken. It’s going to be alright. You have a chance. I haven’t had a chance in about a millennia. And Eliot, you understand it now, that the chance is all that matters.”

Eliot’s eyes again filled with tears, and he felt like he was twelve years old, afraid, but he didn’t feel like hurting anyone because of it.

“I don’t want you to be dead because of me,” he said, his voice croaking. “I don’t want anyone else dead because of me.” So many people were, it felt like. He couldn’t even think of them all in order.

Charlton actually laughed, at that, but it was surprisingly kind. “The world I lived in has been dead for I can’t even comprehend how long,” he said. “I have been dead, too, or at the very least, hiding in cowardice. A half-life, if that. But your world is right on the other side of us. And you have to go. Now.”

But it was Charlton who disappeared, flickering out of existence like someone turned off the light. And Eliot was alone.

“Fuck,” Eliot said at first, like he didn’t understand what had just happened, even though he did. And then he shouted it, with his whole body, in the emptiness of the cottage: “ _Fuck!_ ”

The sound of his voice echoed like it wouldn’t have in the real world, and there was still just him in the cottage. The light was watery, the version of it that was keeping him prisoner now almost colorless. And wasn’t it just like him, really, to keep himself safe by keeping himself stuck? 

There were no instructions. He had no fucking idea what he was supposed to do. This was all him and he _wasn’t even good at anything,_ Jesus Christ, he had literally just gone over this with himself.

He sat down on the couch, and then he slid to the floor, invoking vague memories of doing the same thing with Quentin, Margo, other people who thought they liked him at Brakebills, when he was the High King just of all Physical Kids parties.

“What if I never make a cocktail again?” he said, to the empty room. “Wow.” Actually, maybe that was the one thing he was really exceptional at, but, uh, probably not.

His legs stretched out on the floor in front of him, his palms down on the soft, rich rug that covered the floor like a hug, something he had always liked about the cottage. At a loss for anything else to do, he thought. He thought about why it would be good to be alive and in control of his body.

What was worth it?

Oh, obviously, cocktails. Wine, the champagne that had never taken off in Fillory _._ Magic, the feeling after he did magic. Uh. Fucking. Margo grinning at him on the edge of saying something mean or filthy. Quentin’s dimples. Sitting outside with a drink when it was warm. When he said something that made people laugh. Men’s bodies—collarbones, inner thighs, hair on skin; mostly his prototype now was Quentin, but that was here nor there. Relatedly, dicks. Cooking a really, really involved meal, and then eating it and watching someone else eat it, too. The opium in the air in Fillory, not enough to get anyone high but _enough_ , and even though he was trying to avoid naming drugs, this one did not seem like cheating. Not being alone, getting to not think about himself or his own stupid shit for one, Jesus, one fucking second out of the day. Outliving his terrible fucking father.

Outliving.

And he felt an inner pitch forward, forward, not quite like the last time because there’d been no warning the last time. Eliot broke surface again in his physical body, and there was only forest around him, though he was still sitting.

There was the same haze of Monster pain that colored _existing_ that felt somehow more comprehensible, almost bittersweet, the ebbing of the universe against his awareness gentle. It was like—Eliot thought he Monster understood, the Monster understood he was about to lose something. That was what he was feeling, what they both were feeling.

Eliot did not have time to think if he wanted this, if he wanted to _share_ with the Monster, who had nearly fucking killed him (remained to be seen) and wanted to _take_ everything from him on top of that, because one or both of them started to speak with his body’s mouth.

“ _This world_ ,” he said to the Monster, and the Monster said to him, “it's not just the bad things, or the ones who wronged us.”

The Monster wanted his sister to know— _Sister, my Sister._ But she was a lost cause, which the Monster contemplated with a deep sadness that Eliot would not have thought he was capable of.

That meant that the Monster maybe, somehow, was _not_ a lost cause.

And it was definitely just the Monster who spoke next, telling Eliot, “There is,” and he stopped to take a deep, world-enjoying, life-enjoying breath.

And for a second, Eliot almost regretted that maybe the Monster hadn’t been able to smell that good cinnamon smell, with his body’s fucked nose. But the air of the forest around them was good enough.

“There is such beauty in everything,” the Monster went on. “Even the—"

He was in the cottage, again, still on the floor. Nothing about the scene had changed. For a moment, he just sat there, in the quiet of it.

“Oh,” he said, finally. “Wait. What the fresh fuck.” And then he addressed his complaint to the ceiling:“ _That wasn’t it?_ You’re really going to tell me that wasn’t fucking—”

And then he felt something wet on his stomach, and looked down.

He undid his vest where a dark stain was blooming to find his shirt blossoming in red, red, red. He looked down at it, not feeling a thing, almost curious. Then he blinked and realized he wasn’t feeling _anything,_ and if this was happening to his body, then, shit. _Shit._

His _guts_ were maybe, like, slipping out?

“Shit!” He jumped to his feet and almost thought to press a pillow over it, like an idiot, none of this was fucking real. And as he looked down, helpless, there was Margo in front of him.

Margo. Margo wearing a literal fucking pirate eyepatch, skull and crossbones. Margo, looking at him like she didn’t see him, and he felt joy surging through his whole body.

"Eliot. Eliot?" she was frantic. "Eliot, stay with me."

“Okay, fucking _obviously_ ,” and he grabbed for her arms, not really seeming to hold her, but he didn’t let go. “Always.”

"If there's a tunnel with Grandma, tell her to piss off and come back to me,” Margo all but _screamed,_ right in his face, “you selfish fuck!”

“I’m coming,” he said, still trying to hold her, still feeling like she was slipping away, “I’m not, I’m not leaving. I swear. I don’t fucking want to be selfish, Margo. I promise—”

Reality flickered around them. It was the still the cottage, but the light flared rainbow-bright, shining and alive. He was doing something right, this was closer, he was closer.

“Please keep talking, Bambi, wherever the hell we are,” he said, desperately. And it was good that she didn’t know she was following his directions, because she did.

“Eliot,” she said, almost a whimper, and his heart broke.

And then it wasn’t the cottage, the world around them dark. It was the dim hallway where they did their Secrets during the Trials, candles all scattered, ropes fallen to the floor before they took flight to Brakebills South. And he thought, with a start, that it felt like she was becoming more real, more solid under his hands, impossibly.

Then they were in the throne room in Whitespire, where Margo was magnificently herself, even though in front of him, he could see _her_ heart breaking. He didn’t believe he had this much power over her, but maybe he had to.

Then it was his bedroom at Brakebills, still with the early affectations of _Queen posters,_ distantly embarrassing even right then, what the fuck. These were all part of how he came to understand what a home was, all places that he had gotten to know Margo, be with Margo. Margo was a home for him before he even learned what that was.

And Margo said, desperate, “Eliot, _please_.”

And in his body, the blood and torn flesh on his stomach were hot and real now, still no pain that he felt to speak of, and oh, he was on his back on warm ground.

In his body, Eliot said, "Well, when you put it so sweetly, Bambi."

Margo’s face swam above him, but it lit up, the grin worth coming back from the dead for, struck through with happy tears. And then he heard some shouting apart from them, for a second her face turned away. He couldn’t understand if she said something, and he wondered _why,_ but then.

“Eliot?” Quentin said.

And Eliot, thank fucking god, passed out and thought nothing at all.

*

“So basically, I _totally_ had it handled,” Eliot was saying, “and then my very, _very_ best friend decided to disembowel the shit out of me?”

“Yes,” said Crystal. Weirdly, the tone of it was maybe a little sly. Were therapists allowed to be sly? He hadn’t known a therapist would expect him to use their first name, either, which seemed pretty fucked up to him. But she smiled up at him, from the legal pad she was for some reason writing on even though she was, uh. A magic therapist. Whatever that meant.

There was a degree in Counseling and Clinical Psychology from Columbia, normal as fuck, hung up on the wall behind her. She looked like a young mom, in a nice enough way, with short, blunt black hair. 

Eliot narrowed his eyes at her. “Was that judgment?”

“It wasn’t,” Crystal said, easily. “Why do you think it was?” Oh, god, this was the kind of therapy talk he expected. From therapy.

“Um. It sounded...judgy,” he said, aware he was probably being stubborn.

“I’m sorry about that. I didn’t mean for it to be and I’ll try to be more mindful of it with you if you keep seeing me. And your best friend’s name is Margo,” she said, her tone still even, kind. “You told me a few times. You don’t need to explain who it was.”

Eliot was taken aback. “Do I keep...explaining?”

Crystal nodded, patiently, apparently without judgment. Or so she claimed.

“Is that weird of me? That seems weird of me.”

“Nothing’s weird, Eliot,” she said, which was like, the least true thing he’d ever heard, maybe. “From a certain point of view, of course. Everyone learns different ways to interact with the world.”

Well. Wow. Okay. Maybe that was true.

She put the legal pad down— _face_ down, so he couldn’t read any salacious details of her thoughts about him, wow. “How upfront do you want me to be with you about things like this?”

“Very,” he said easily, leaning forward, a little like he was about to start playing, probably.

Crystal smiled at him. “I think you keep explaining things like that to me, just in this one half-session we have been together so far, because you don’t expect other people to remember things about you,” she said. “I think you try your best to be very memorable.”

Both of Eliot’s brows shot up. “Wow, okay, sorry,” he said, “we were talking about me being possessed by an evil god and almost dying—”

“Yes,” said Crystal, patient again.

“And _this_ is where your fucking analysis is,” he finished.

Crystal seemed to think about what he said for a second, and made an apologetic face, sitting back further in her chair. “I’m sorry, Eliot,” she said. “That’s a boundary for us now. We can work up to talking about things like that, if you want to.”

Eliot was somehow even more taken aback. Was this more frustrating than being very gently confronted? Being told he had to make his own choices about what they were _working on?_ Jesus. He hated therapy.

“I mean,” he started, apropos of nothing, “I’m full of shit, so.”

Crystal seemed to need time to consider this, too. “That’s not a kind way to talk about yourself,” she said. “Those aren’t the words I would use.”

He almost groaned. “Okay, in that case. What words _would_ you use, doc?” She had a PhD, apparently, so that was fair game.

It sounded like she was figuring out how to be gentle as she spoke, a tone he usually hated, but that he didn’t mind when she said, “Okay. We just met, Eliot. But from what you’ve told me, it sounds like you built up a lot of defenses that you don’t need to be safe anymore. But you’re not a bad person or wrong for having those defenses in the first place. Not at all. Everyone needs to protect themselves, but you can change how you do it.”

Eliot blinked at her, frozen suddenly where he had leaned very confidently forward.

She continued, gently, “At one point you may have needed your specific defense mechanisms to survive. Now you may not.”

And something about the word _survive_ twinged something in the core of him. For the most part he remembered the stuff that had all happened, like, in his head in a kind of Cliff’s Notes, Quizlet version, not quite like trying to recall a dream. It was more tangible than that; it was in the proverbial book of spells that was himself. But some things he remembered very specifically. And right then, he thought, _I’m alive so I can come back from this._

“Oh,” he said, out loud. “Oh, shit.”

Crystal, apparently not needing the full context of the thought, smiled at him very kindly. “Would you like to do some work together, Eliot?” she asked.

Eliot’s idea to do therapy was less of an idea and more of a _compulsion,_ like, he had to do everything in his power to not be a fuck up, because he was _still_ going to fuck up even if he did do all of this shit. But once he had it, and expressed it to Quentin when he was still in the fucking hospital at Brakebills, Quentin’s mouth had dropped open, looking down at him. For once they were without Margo; he didn’t want to share that with her just yet, then.

“Um,” Eliot had said, in the immediate awkward pause aftermath. “I mean. Could you, like. Help me. Find a therapist?”

“Oh,” said Quentin, sitting fully up in his seat that reclined, where he had slept every night that Eliot was there. “Eliot, that is, a, uh—it’s not a brag if I say that’s an _area of expertise?_ ”

And after a few seconds of kind of gawking at each other, they both laughed. Eliot laughed longer than Quentin had, helpless, alive, even though it gave way to his whole body hurting.

(“Oh hey, she went to Columbia!” Quentin said, scrolling through Crystal’s _Psychology Today_ page on someone’s laptop in the penthouse.

Eliot had raised a brow at his excitement. Quentin had looked over at him only when he didn’t immediately respond, having been very involved in, Eliot guessed, reading therapeutic philosophy descriptions in detail.

“Um. I went to Columbia?” Quentin said, a little sheepish.

“I know you did, Q,” Eliot had said. Quentin had seemed relieved.)

In general, Quentin seemed to be a little _freaked out_ , almost, when Eliot said things like that, or talked about things a certain way. Definitely taken aback. But he knew that it wasn’t because the fact of it was scary. It had just all been off-camera, from Quentin’s perspective.

Things had been off-camera for Eliot, too. There was Quentin’s loss of hope that he was still dealing with, every day, that they were dealing with together, maybe. There was even how Quentin briefly got back together with Alice, which was painful for Eliot to think about, but when they talked about it and he felt it pit in his stomach, he realized with a shock that it wasn’t because he was jealous. Not entirely.

It was because Quentin, in tears, presented it as an artifact of giving up hope that he would ever see Eliot again, that he wouldn’t just die to save Eliot _._ He wasn’t able to be mad at him or incredulous, not that those would have been reasonable responses, anyway, really, though he was famously unreasonable. The pain he felt was for Quentin.

“Hey,” he had said, concerned and with no real other place to put it, “come here,” and Quentin had breathed in shakily before handing his body over, and Eliot had held him.

And he had whispered against Quentin’s head, “We’re never, ever going to try to die for each other again, alright?”

It was a promise that would be hard to keep. But he was planning on it.

But after Eliot’s first therapy appointment, Quentin told him he would be waiting for him when he was done. And of course, Quentin was. But he wasn’t even in the lobby downstairs; he was waiting at the elevator on the floor Crystal’s office was on, leaned by the _Up_ and _Down_ buttons, like a good parent picking up their kid from school.

“ _Okay_ ,” started Quentin as he approached, straightening, apparently excited, “how did it go?”

Eliot grinned. “Hi to you too, Q,” he said, mildly, pressing the down button as he leaned in to kiss him, almost perfunctory, holding Quentin’s neck with the hand that he did not need for his cane.

He was expecting annoyance from Quentin, but Quentin just smiled into his mouth.

“Hi,” Quentin said, his voice going a little private, and Eliot’s stomach flipped like he was in middle school. _Still._

“You’re doing that on purpose,” accused Eliot, without venom.

“No, no, I’m not, I’m not doing anything. What is it I’m doing?” Quentin asked, smile dimpling.

Eliot almost rolled his eyes, hand dropping from him for the moment, hitting the button for the elevator again and not with the silver of his cane this time.

“Tell me how it went, El,” said Quentin, sliding an arm around his waist, both bracing so he wouldn’t have to lean as much with his cane and just touching him.

“It was awful,” Eliot reported diligently. “Fucking hated it. Absolutely not for me. Never going back.”

“Oh. Uh. Okay, great. Sound good,” said Quentin. “When’s the next appointment?”

Eliot laughed, turning his face into his. “Same time next week,” he said. “I’ll have to clear my very tight schedule of sleeping in, in wildly elegant physical pain.” It was not wildly elegant.

Quentin hummed his approval and tip-toed up to kiss Eliot’s forehead, very tender.

And of course they were going to fight over stupid shit, just like they had the time they did this before. Of course the world would want to end next week, or something new and fun would try to kill just them specifically. And there was a lot he hadn’t said to Quentin yet, even though he’d already told Quentin enough things that had made him seem to reel back with how _big_ it all was.

But there was one thing he had told him. He could hardly stop saying it.

“Love you, Q,” was what Eliot said, pressing a kiss back to Quentin’s temple, for his trouble.

“Love you, El,” said Quentin.

The elevator doors finally dinged open, and anywhere he walked with Quentin, he was walking into the rest of his life.

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warnings include intense though more or less canon-typical stuff: violent homophobic bullying/internalized homophobia, homophobic physical and emotional child abuse, addiction (with some very casual references), child death and grief. there's vaguer references to suicidal ideation and depression. there's also some discussion around issues of self-worth and sex. protect yourself, please! love you, kids.


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